Yes, you read it right, we’re going to tell you how to earn money by shopping online. Not how to earn more at work so you can shop more, and not how to save money on shopping, but how to earn some good hard cash through the act of shopping itself.
The post is inspired by the upcoming shopping season – we are going to shop like crazy during the upcoming 6 months, so let’s try to make it more fun and more useful!
The key is to make use of any of our three favorite Internet tools and services listed below. You might just use one, you might use all three. It’s up to you, but we can assure you that if you use them right, all three will earn you money:
1. Earn by reviewing the stuff you buy
Epinions.com is a consumer-led website that consists of customer reviews on a huge range of commercial products. Don’t worry if you don’t think you’re a good writer – the principle of sites like these is that the members reflect the real consumer market, and your review simply reflects your personal experience and opinion. That can be positive, negative or indifferent; it doesn’t matter.
Epinions pays its members when it earns from their reviews, and a prospective customer clicks the link on that site and makes a purchase. The site then pay out to members using an “˜income share pool’, which is basically all the earnings gathered together, and then distributed according to whoever wrote a helpful review. Of course, reviewing the latest products is going to give you an advantage, because those are the the ones prospective buyers need advice on. If you live in the US then you can redeem your earnings (by postal check) when you reach $10; non-US members have to wait until $100.
We do recommend that you research a site like this before you sign up and start writing, as there are some that are scams and won’t actually pay for the content you write. Epinions is a trustworthy example.
2. Earn by answering shopping-related questions
This is a relatively new concept in online shopping, whereby users can ask questions on shopping and answer them too. Our favorite site of this type, IMshopping, claims that questions will be answered within 15 minutes, which we think makes it one of the best ways to get your shopping queries answered. Of course there’s always twitter, but twitter doesn’t pay!
You earn money from IM shopping by answering questions in the Answer For Money category. You can search for questions by niche, so that you’re more likely to find questions you know how to answer. Questions can be anything: from where to buy an iPhone online to how to save on computer and grab a cool Dell coupon code. You earn when your answer is voted as the “˜best’ by other members (think Yahoo Answers as the type of algorithm used here) after 72 hours. The money is split between any members who tie for the best answer.
- The minimum amount you can redeem at this site is a little more than Epinions
- at $40, and you will have to wait for 30 days to receive it. Like Buxr.com,
- howeK K/ 1 ver, the payment is made by PayPal, which is usually more convenient
- than a check.
3. Earn by Selling Your Gift Cards
It is wicked you can buy and (more importantly) sell gift cards – I never knew that. With the shopping season being particularly rich in gift cards this find will come particularly in handy.
There are a few online companies like Plastic Jungle and GiftCards.com that you can sell gift cards to for a percentage of the cards value. They will then sell your gift cards to somebody that does like shopping at that store.
Here’s a handy table (same link as a few lined above) that shows the percentage of the gift cards value that each discount gift card seller will pay for your unwanted gift cards. Click on a link to the merchant you wish to sell your gift card to and you should receive the percent of the gift card value listed above for the sale.
Post image via ehow.com